Migration to AWS Cloud: Improving Scalability
and Mitigating Security Threats

With high growth prospects, the client wanted to move their recruitment software to a more reliable infrastructure that offered better performance and security. Key expectations included:

• High levels of uptime and reliability
• Increased manageability of the system with less human intervention
• Ability to easily scale up or out as needed

The key to reducing and stopping DDoS attacks was to utilize a defense-in-depth approach without creating limitations in performance or scalability. We suggested an AWS architecture with Cloudflare WAF/CDN, Bruteforce attack prevention (with Fail2ban), and AWS Security Groups along with EBS data encryption. Failover mechanisms and elastic computing were implemented to ensure optimal performance and better user experience. With a systematic and fool-proof AWS migration, we rectified reported issues on the live site. Our DevOps team rebuilt the code where required. While migrating the recruitment portal, we improved view layouts of several documents such as resumes and contracts. AWS RDS being a dedicated DB engine significantly improved performance. With CDN implemented, latency was scaled down considerably.

• Applicant record indexing was faster by 43%
• 22% improvement in application response time
• Significantly improved website performance with reduced latency

Environment Setup:We set up three separate AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances for the live, testing, and blog servers. The live server hosts the recruitment portal and is accessible by customers and applicants. The testing server provides a one-click staging site with rollback functionality. A single instance hosts the WordPress blog server that manages the recruitment process. These instances are backed with Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) for data and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for snapshot backups.

Deployment:

• Migrated three servers from Linode Hosting to AWS
• Migrated development environment with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF)
• Set up a central RDS database
• Set up cloud security, data encryption, and disaster management mechanism for the new infrastructure

Implementation:

• Created VPC for better control of our virtual networking environment; launched a single instance and migrated WordPress site with database to RDS
• Launched parallel instances for both live and testing sites
• Migrated PHP and Java codes along with DB data and tested sites
• Set up ElasticSearch, OpenOffice and JodConverter
• Set up WAF and CDN
• WordPress upgrade, security patches, and Beanstalk configuration
• Set up monitoring with Nagios, New Relic, and Graylog
• Restricted access with AWS VPC and Security Groups, SSH key authentication, and Fail2ban
• Set up AWS EBS volume encryption
• Set up backup configuration for EBS volumes and RDS

• Android SDK
• iOS
• Drupal 8
• HTML5
• AWS EC2
• AWS SNS
• AWS SES
• AWS S3
• Gearman